Madame Tussauds - New York

History in the making

Born August 4, 1961, Barack Obama is the 44th and current President of the United States and the first African American to hold office.

President Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. He has worked as a civil rights attorney and served as a community organizer in Chicago, and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004.

Obama went on to serve three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004 and then appointed a seat in the US Senate in 2004, after an unsuccessful bid in 2000. His victory raised his visibility and his prime-time televised keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004 made him a rising star nationally in the Democratic Party. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in November 2004 by the largest margin in Illinois history.

Obama began his run for the presidency in February 2007 and after a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party primaries against Hillary Clinton, he won his party's nomination, becoming the first major party African American candidate for president. He went on to defeat Republican candidate John McCain and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009.